Book of the Week
Book of the Week: A Pick by William L. Fox
Director of the Center for Art + Environment William L. Fox selects The Last Road by Anne Noble as photo-eye Book of the Week.
This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Director of the Center for Art + Environment William L. Fox who has selected
The Last Road by Anne Noble published by Clouds.
"New Zealand photographer Anne Noble has traveled to the Antarctic as a visiting artist with both New Zealand and American government programs, and from those visits generated a body of work that effectively builds upon, extends, and then ultimately counters images made during the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration of the early twentieth century. Her first book of Antarctic photographs,
Ice Blink, was a witty undermining of the numerous ways in which the Antarctic is depicted in museums, tourist shops, and other decidedly non-heroic venues. Her recent and second installment in the series,
The Last Road, presents portraits in series of quotidian items such as heavy equipment, shipping containers, and the 'piss poles' around which workers relieve themselves in order to contain contamination of the ice by urine. Noble is picturing the backside of civilization at the ends of the earth, and unlike most other photographers who have worked on the ice, she has taken a direct look at our relationship to this landscape not through the lens of the sublime, but rather through that of the constructed reality that is allowed to live and work there, albeit for only brief periods of time." —William L. Fox
William L. Fox, Director of the
Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published fifteen books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Fox has researched and written books set in the extreme environments of the Antarctic, the Arctic, Chile, Nepal, and other locations. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club and he is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation.
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